HDS Makes Case for CAS

Hitachi Data Systems unveiled the first fruits of its partnership with Archivas Monday, a content-addressed storage (CAS) system that HDS says offers open standards-based interfaces, scalability and data protection not found in other offerings.

First-generation CAS solutions weren't built with records management in mind and tried to respond by using an API between archive applications and the archive repository, said Jack Domme, HDS senior vice president for global solutions strategy and development. Such proprietary solutions focus on storing content, not accessing it, he says, creating scalability and migration problems.

"We are the only company with a solution that answers the demands of records managers and IT," boasts Domme.

HDS says its new Content Archive Platform appliance supports policy-based integration from many distributed or centralized repositories such as e-mail, file systems, databases, applications and content or document management systems. It ensures secure archive-quality retention, preservation and verifiable destruction of content, and offers features such as centralized search, policy-based retention, authentication and protection.

John Webster, senior analyst and founder of Data Mobility Group, said the HDS platform "offers the CIO an ability to leverage the active archive for use in business intelligence types of applications."

The platform uses open standards-based interfaces such as NFS, CIFS, WebDAV and HTTP and storage management standards such as SMI-S to avoid proprietary APIs, and files are stored in their native form and original names to ensure access.

The platform scales to over 300 terabytes and supports 350 million files per archive, and uses 4 gigabytes of cache per server for faster performance.

The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is priced at $225,000 for a base configuration of 10TB of raw capacity, 5TB usable capacity, in an integrated full-featured solution with maintenance for 12 months.